I don't know of any similar projects ...(Epic necro ahead .... )
How about some verbal inflection:

11. Verbal agreement
Omlűt distinguishes 12 different person in its verbal inflection.6 How do these come about, you might ask. There are three different persons (1st,2nd,3rd) an inclusive vs. exclusive distinction in first person and three grammatical numbers (singular, dual, plural). Dual is used more frequently in verbal conjugation than it is in nominal declension, which sometimes leads to situations where a plural noun might trigger dual agreement. The third person singular is the most unmarked form for all aspects. Verbal agreement markers usually occur without an overt pronoun.
Examples:

12. Aspects
There are two grammatical aspects in Omlűt: perfective and imperfective. The aspect conjugation is fused with person conjugation. Sometimes perfective aspect is also used with a more past-like meaning.7
Examples:

13. Other (semi-)inflectional categories.
Verbs can also be nominalized by adding the suffix -<ërë> and are used as nouns. If they are subordinated (e.g. used with an auxiliary verb), they sometimes take a participle suffix -<ënë>.
Examples:

Creyeditor wrote:
The name is inspired by a certain speaker of American English saying the German loanword ⟨Umlaut⟩ as [uːm.laut].2

Out of curiosity, how would you like English speakers to say it?

I thought the same thing, since that's how I've always said it (substituting [æʊ̯] for [au̯]). According to Wiktionary, it can also be pronounced /ˈʊmlaʊ̯t/ or, in the UK, /ˈʌmlaʊ̯t/, and the pronunciation /ˈuːmlaʊ̯t/ is chiefly American.

Umm, all the phonemes in the German word Umlaut are found in major dialects of English, and they're not in any weird order, so you should be able to get closer than that without spending hours practicing new sounds or sequences...

I was just surprised by how radically different your pronunciation is from anything I've heard, especially the /ɑ/ for <au> (although in retrospect, that might not be so strange depending on what mergers your dialect has).

HoskhMatriarch wrote:Umm, all the phonemes in the German word Umlaut are found in major dialects of English, and they're not in any weird order, so you should be able to get closer than that without spending hours practicing new sounds or sequences...

German /ʊ/ is often quite different in quality from English /ʊ/. My /ʊ/ is even more fronted than my /uː/; the nearest German vowel to it is probably /œ/. So I'd feel a bit odd using it for the first vowel in Umlaut. (The diphthong is also different, although it's not as noticeable since it's not in such a crowded region of the vowel chart, and the gliding direction is distinctive enough to avoid confusion. My /aʊ/ starts out with a fronter vowel than German /aʊ/).

shimobaatar wrote:Everything looks great here so far; hopefully we'll get to see more soon! I can't believe I hadn't seen this thread before now.

Thank you

shimobaatar wrote:

Creyeditor wrote:
The name is inspired by a certain speaker of American English saying the German loanword ⟨Umlaut⟩ as [uːm.laut].2

Out of curiosity, how would you like English speakers to say it?

Well in German it's [ˈʔʊm.laʊ̯t] and I think I would be happy if all the u's would be lax. Having the first u a bit fronted is not that big of a deal, it was more the length and timing characteristics, that made the u's so much more prominent, I guess.

shimobaatar wrote:

Creyeditor wrote:
Afterwards the name is explained as a conjugated form of ⟨omlut⟩ which means "to conversate, to talk to each other".

How is it conjugated? That is to say, what does the conjugated form mean?

Okay, so the verb stem is the root <lut> 'speak' with a prefix <om-> for reciprocal actions. The verb root shows i-umlaut and u-umlaut. This happens in the 1PL.INCL form of the imperfective, which in other circumstances would have a schwa suffix. This is deleted in the name of the language, because it is so frequently used.

shimobaatar wrote:

Creyeditor wrote:The dative can be used in many occasions where you would not expect it.

I was just surprised by how radically different your pronunciation is from anything I've heard, especially the /ɑ/ for <au> (although in retrospect, that might not be so strange depending on what mergers your dialect has).

Well, I'm pretty sure they were using spelling pronunciation, since <au> is usually /ɑ/ in American dialects, and unstressed <u> is usually /ə/.

Sumelic wrote:

HoskhMatriarch wrote:Umm, all the phonemes in the German word Umlaut are found in major dialects of English, and they're not in any weird order, so you should be able to get closer than that without spending hours practicing new sounds or sequences...

German /ʊ/ is often quite different in quality from English /ʊ/. My /ʊ/ is even more fronted than my /uː/; the nearest German vowel to it is probably /œ/. So I'd feel a bit odd using it for the first vowel in Umlaut. (The diphthong is also different, although it's not as noticeable since it's not in such a crowded region of the vowel chart, and the gliding direction is distinctive enough to avoid confusion. My /aʊ/ starts out with a fronter vowel than German /aʊ/).

I said that the phonemes were the same, not that they were precisely the same in phonetic detail.

Last edited by HoskhMatriarch on 25 Jun 2016 04:11, edited 1 time in total.

Creyeditor wrote:
Well in German it's [ˈʔʊm.laʊ̯t] and I think I would be happy if all the u's would be lax. Having the first u a bit fronted is not that big of a deal, it was more the length and timing characteristics, that made the u's so much more prominent, I guess.

I was just surprised by how radically different your pronunciation is from anything I've heard, especially the /ɑ/ for <au> (although in retrospect, that might not be so strange depending on what mergers your dialect has).

Well, I'm pretty sure they were using spelling pronunciation, since <au> is usually /ɑ/ in American dialects, and unstressed <u> is usually /ə/.

My dialect (I'm American) distinguishes between /ɒ/ for <au>, <aw>, and some short <o>, and /ɑ/ for broad <a> and most short <o>, which is why I found the /ɑ/ for <au> unusual at first.

15. Basic word order
The basic word order in Omlűt is XOVS9. Yes, the weirdest word order XOVS. At least that's what I intended. It turns out, that in combination with the marked nominative alignment and subject pro-drop it actually looks quite naturalistic. Most sentences transitive now look more like OV, XOV or XV, which is appears in a lot of prodrop language. Have some examples.

In transitive sentences with a full noun phrase subject, it almost feels as if one is just reintroducing the subject due to the marked nominative and the verbal agreement. Something like: "bread he-eats ... oh and he is a robot by the way." The basic orders are OVS and XOVS.

Now you have seen almost the whole ugliness of the Omlűt syntax. I guess my next post will either be about noun phrases or verb phrases. 9 X means adverbial phrase/ prepositional phrase. 10 maybe also XV, since I don't know yet if I consider these real objects.

Creyeditor wrote:
The basic word order in Omlűt is XOVS9. Yes, the weirdest word order XOVS. At least that's what I intended. It turns out, that in combination with the marked nominative alignment and subject pro-drop it actually looks quite naturalistic. Most sentences transitive now look more like OV, XOV or XV, which is appears in a lot of prodrop language. Have some examples.

Creyeditor wrote:
Intransitive sentences have a XVS or VS order, which is not to bad, if you look at it from a typological perspective.

Creyeditor wrote:
In transitive sentences with a full noun phrase subject, it almost feels as if one is just reintroducing the subject due to the marked nominative and the verbal agreement. Something like: "bread he-eats ... oh and he is a robot by the way." The basic orders are OVS and XOVS.

Creyeditor wrote:
Now you have seen almost the whole ugliness of the Omlűt syntax. I guess my next post will either be about noun phrases or verb phrases.

I agree that it's "weird", but it looks like it works just fine, and you've explained things quite clearly and straightforwardly, so I'm afraid I don't have anything in particular to say other than that everything looks great, as usual. I look forward to hearing more about syntax.

16. Verb phrases
Verb phrases ('broad VPs') in a broader definition include the modal particles, the verb and the object. The narrow definition (narrow VP) excludes the object and is a discontinious constituent, because the modal particles occur before the object. The modal particles express epistemic and deontic modality. An example is the particle xa used for deontic necessity and strong possibility, i.e. something like 'should', 'want' or 'need'.

As you can see these particles can occur without full verbs, if the predicate is nominal. Verb phrases with more than one verb occur only very rarely. Instead, an embedded clause with a dummy pronoun is often used.

I decided to draw some trees for the verb phrases in a kind of made-up generative fashion (mostly based on minimalism).

Creyeditor wrote:
As you can see these particles can occur without full verbs, if the predicate is nominal. Verb phrases with more than one verb occur only very rarely. Instead, an embedded clause with a dummy pronoun is often used.

Could we perhaps see an example without a nominal predicate, one with multiple verbs, and one with an embedded clause with a dummy pronoun?

Well, I am currently revising some stuff in my files and transferring it to the forum and ordering it. Right now I have a hard time coming up with some of the complex sentences shimobaatar asked for. Actually here is a sentence with two verbs, one of them is a participle. <strast> 'be able' is one of the few verbs that embedds narrow verb phrases. It is also an irregular verb wrt conjugation (see above).